homeschooling

Cursive handwriting is something I learned in the third grade. As a parent who didn’t really know anything about homeschooling or what it should look like, I assumed that that was when kids were mentally and physically able to handle the task of writing in cursive. So color me surprised when I was assigned the Rhythm of Handwriting Cursive – Complete Set by Logic of English to review. The folks over there recommend teaching kids cursive before teaching them manuscript. There are several reasons for this, most of which are based around the idea that “it’s just easier.” (For example, all the lowercase letters begin at the same place and spacing within and between words is more easily controlled.) The one that stuck with me the most, though – and the one that made me wish we’d had this program for Seahawk two years ago – was that when writing in cursive, it’s hard to mix up the B and the D. Think about it: what does a cursive lowercase B look like? Nothing like a lowercase D, unlike their manuscript counterparts.

But Seahawk did learn cursive as a third-grader, and he (rarely) mixes up his Bs and Ds anymore. So we used this program with Munchkin, who has been desperately begging me to teach him cursive for about a year. He was positively thrilled when the package arrived, and even now that it’s been several weeks, still loves his cursive handwriting lessons.

The complete set includes everything you need to get started teaching your child (recommended age for Rhythm of Handwriting is 4 to adult) cursive handwriting. You get a softcover workbook ($15), a white board for practicing ($12), cursive tactile cards which are like flash cards, but the letters on the front are a sandpaper-like texture for the child to feel how the letter goes ($28), and a cursive handwriting chart which details each letter along with the steps for forming that letter ($10). You can purchase the items separately at the prices listed above or as a complete set for $65. The only things you need to provide are a dry erase marker, a pencil, and a student.

Inside the workbook are several suggested schedules for teaching the letters. It all depends on the age and enthusiasm of your student. Because Munchkin is a solid reader and writer, we moved pretty quickly through the workbook; he learned 4 new letters a day on the “learning” days and moved even faster through on the “review/word” days.

We started the program using it exactly as prescribed. This involved going over the letter names and sounds on the flash cards, having him trace the texture of the letter on the card with his finger, having me describe exactly how to form the letters to him, and then finally having him write the letters in the workbook.

He quickly grew tired of this.

He’s the strongest reader of the two boys, so he already knew the letter sounds; that made that portion of the lesson unnecessary. The workbook includes large versions of the letters that he traced with his finger when he felt it was necessary to “figure it out,” so we didn’t end up using the cards all that often – the book alone was enough. The same was true for the white board. He was competent enough to just dive right into the workbook, using a pencil. I’m not saying this to diminish the necessity/quality of those products – they’re fabulous. They just weren’t necessary in our situation. For a younger child, or one who isn’t a super strong reader/writer, they would be invaluable assets.

I think this program was great. It was easy to teach, and I felt like it was easy for Munchkin to learn the letters. And he’s so excited to be able to read and write in cursive now.

His thoughts?

I really like it. My favorite part was learning the capital letters because they’re more complicated. I liked the challenge. Learning to combine letters into words was exciting too. It’s awesome because you can clearly read cursive when you learn to write it.

Logic of English has loads of other products, too – not just the handwriting program we used. Make sure to click the banner at the end of this post to read reviews of all the different products Crew members were blessed with! Additionally, you can find them on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter.

Math is one of those subjects that so many parents dread teaching their children. It can be difficult, that’s for sure. I would never want to do it without help – and I was good at math! Australian company CTC Math is here to be that help for us. For the purposes of this review, I was given a free 12 Month Family Plan subscription.

How it Works

CTC Math is an online math curriculum for all ages, Kindergarten through 12th grade. The program consists of over 1300 video lessons, each one narrated by Pat Murray, a father of ten (who, I might add, has a lovely Australian accent!). The videos are very well done, each one clearly explaining the concept being taught along with animated examples. Once the child has watched the video, they move on to the questions portion of the lesson, which is really just an interactive worksheet.

For the lower grades (K-5), CTC Math qualifies as a full curriculum; for grades 6-12, it should be used as a supplement to something else.

CTC Math is offering a special promotion right now for homeschoolers: you can get their family plan (unlimited access to all grade levels for as many students as you have) for $118.80. The normal price for this program is $297, so this is pretty significant savings. One thing to be aware of is that when you sign up for the program, you’re given 5 student spots. If you have more than five students, just shoot them an email and they’ll open up your account to allow as many as you need. They’re always happy to do that. (Remember when I said that narrator and founder Pat Murray had 10 kids? Yeah. These guys understand big families!)

How Seahawk and Munchkin Used the Program

The best part (at least for our family) was that they have the videos set up to work on a computer with Flash or on a mobile device without it. Because we only have one computer, which Will needs for work most days, it was a nice surprise when I tried CTC on the Kindle Fire and it worked. On days the computer was available, the boys used it, but over 90% of the time, they used the Kindle, so it was really awesome that we had that as an option.

As a rule, we do the “together” schoolwork first, and then I get the boys going on their individual assignments. CTC Math is included in the latter category. I would get one of them going on math and the other on a different subject, and they would switch.

Like I mentioned before, there’s a short video on each topic that the child watches first. These videos range from about 2-7 minutes long. The student can watch the video as many times as (s)he needs to in order to fully comprehend the material. There were times when my boys needed to watch the videos more than once, so it was really nice that there were no limits on the video-watching. Once they’re confident they understand the information, they move on to the questions portion of the lesson.

I had the kids use the program every day – it took the place of our previous math curriculum, which was actually pretty similar to this, just without the video. Being able to add the video in was excellent. Our other workbook didn’t do a very good job of explaining what to do or why things were done that way. CTC Math covered essentially the same topics as that workbook, but Pat explained things much better than I could. The kids really started excelling whereas before, they were just getting by.

Our Opinion

I think this product is pretty awesome. It’s most useful if you want a “traditional” math curriculum for your kids. As a public school graduate, “traditional” is all I know. This fit that bill beautifully. My kids . . . well, I hate to say it, but they’re lazy when it comes to schoolwork. They don’t love anything we do. At least not the stuff that feels like “real” school. But they like CTC Math a whole lot better than our old workbooks, so that’s good praise for the program.

My only real critique of the program is that everything is done in the metric system, even though we were on the United States curriculum. That’s a pretty minor thing in my opinion, though. After all, the entire rest of the world uses the metric system, and honestly, the mechanics for measuring are the same whether you’re using centimeters or inches.

They boys’ absolute favorite thing about the program was the certificates they earned by performing well on their questions. If students get 100% on all of their questions in a particular unit, they earn a Platinum certificate, 95% earns a gold, 90% earns a silver, and 85% gets bronze. These certificates are emailed to the parent for optional printing. We don’t have any printer ink right now, so we didn’t print the certificates, but I’ve saved all the emails so we can print them at a later time. Even just seeing the certificates on the screen put huge smiles on my kids’ faces.

I have one child who is a naturally good speller (like my husband and me), and one who definitely is not. When I heard that Demme Learning, the company that gave Math-U-See to the homeschool world, was introducing a spelling curriculum, Spelling You See, I knew I needed to try to get on this review for Seahawk’s sake. Writing and creating are very important to our family, and his poor spelling skills were really hindering him in some major ways. It was to the point of being difficult to read some of his original writings because he spelled 100% phonetically. That’s okay for some words, but as a general rule in English, you can’t rely on phonetics to get you by.

There are 5 levels of Spelling You See curriculum (each assigned a letter), and we got the fourth level up, Spelling You See: Americana (Level D). The levels are assigned mostly based on your child’s age, but reading level is taken into account a little bit, too. You can start Level A with really little kids; as soon as they start to learn that “letters make sounds and sounds make words,” they’re ready for Spelling You See. The higher levels of the program are designed specifically for elementary-age kids, but can also be used as reinforcement for students who need remedial work. That said, the program is not based primarily on your child’s grade level; rather, you work with them, and as they master the concepts from one level, you can then move them up as you, the parent and educator, see fit. There are guidelines given by the company to help you establish on which level to start your student, and then you can move them on from there.

In Americana, your child is given a paragraph to work with. They work through the same paragraph – which are little snippets of American history – every day for five days. There are different “chunks” your child is assigned to find within the paragraph, and each kind of chunk is given its own color. Vowel chunks (any two vowels in a row, as well as a vowel followed by a Y or a W) are colored in yellow. Consonant chunks (any two consonants that work together to make one sound – th or ch for example) are blue. “Bossy R” chunks (a vowel followed by an R, because that R changes the sound the vowel makes) are purple. You get the idea. The idea is to teach the child that certain letter combinations make certain sounds, and that when they hear those sounds – in their heads as they’re writing or verbally during a spelling activity – they can assign the correct letter combination to the sound.

A properly “chunked” passage

After the child has found all the chunks for the day (which chunks they’re supposed to find vary based on the lesson; during the first two weeks of a specific kind of chunk, it’s just it on its own, and then after that, they start combining them into the same lesson), they move onto copywork. The first three lessons, the child is expected to copy down the passage, limiting the time spent to 10 minutes. No more. The idea is to help your child be a better speller without making them hate the experience of learning how. The last two days of the week, you read the paragraph to the child, a little bit at a time, and have them write down the words. This is dictation in lieu of the copywork; they’ve had three days to get familiar with the words, so then they’re going to see how many they can spell correctly. On day 4, they’re allowed to ask for help, but day 5 is kind of the equivalent of the “end of the week spelling test” (but don’t ever really call it that!) and they’re supposed to just try to write the words on their own as you read them. I think the best part of the dictation on Day 5 (Lesson “E” each week) is that the workbook has a place to record how many words your student spelled right. Not wrong, not a percentage, not “this many out of this many.” How many they got right. We found that to be a huge encouragement for Seahawk. He was thrilled when after the very first week he was spelling so many words correctly.

Dictation work for Lesson 5E. The arrow at the bottom emphasizes the idea of correct words.

Spelling You See: Level D: Americana is in the form of a Teacher’s Manual for you ($14) and a pair of workbooks for your child ($30 for both). (Pricing varies from level to level.) Each student workbook has 18 five-day lessons, so one set of the books will get you all the way through the 36-week school year. All the books are softcover, and the student workbooks have perforated pages in case you want to tear them out for whatever reason (I didn’t). The student books are perfect bound, while the teacher manual is saddle-stitched (stapled).

The program is designed to be used five days a week, and that’s exactly what we did with Seahawk. He needed this program so badly, that even on the days we didn’t do a full day of school, I still was really strict with him on getting his Spelling You See done.

And you know what?

It works.

This program really, truly works. I could tell after the very first week that it was working, and now that we’ve been using it for seven weeks, the difference in his spelling is drastic. Spelling was one of the hardest things to get him to care about; he’d pretty much just accepted the fact that he was a “bad speller.” But not anymore. He’s got the confidence to write more. He doesn’t ask for help with spelling as much anymore – and not because he’s given up. Because he’s spelling the words correctly! His spelling in the other subjects is slowly starting to improve as well. It’s not quite as strong as his spelling with the Americana paragraphs, but to a certain extent, that’s to be expected. He is, after all, writing the same paragraph five times a week.

He’s still got a long way to go, but with this program, he’s well on his way. And I definitely hope to buy Level E: American Spirit for him when he finishes up Americana. What better praise is that?

Blessings,

Wendy

You can connect with Spelling You See on Facebook and Twitter if you’re so inclined 🙂

I love languages. I love reading and writing in my native English, and I love learning new languages. So imagine my excitement when the opportunity to review Mango Homeschool Edition from Mango Languages came up on The Schoolhouse Review Crew. Ecstatic!

I’ve talked before about our foreign language pursuits with the boys. Remember last summer when I posted about our upcoming homeschooling plans? I mentioned that we were going to try to learn Spanish. Well, that didn’t work out too well because I don’t speak enough (read: any) Spanish to have been able to teach the boys. So we switched to French. I speak enough French to have begun working with the kiddos, but we were quickly getting to a place where I needed more help. It has been 15 years since I graduated high school, after all, and since I don’t have the opportunity to travel often, there was no real way for me to continue cultivating my French skills.

We used books from the library, and when I was given access to SchoolhouseTeachers.com, we used the French lessons on there. But I was still itching for something even more. Mango Homeschool Edition turned out to be just the thing!

About Mango

Mango Homeschool Edition is appropriate for almost everyone in your family. The suggested age range is 7 and up – like a board game … You’re never too old! It has over 50 languages to choose from, most of them “serious,” but also a “silly” one or two, including Pirate. That was the first one my husband wanted to check out, of course! He’s just a funny guy to his core. But for the kids and me, we were pretty serious about just doing our French. Mango Homeschool Edition works using a translation method, meaning they say to you (in English) “Here’s how you say ‘Hello.’ ” Then a native speaker comes on and says the word and/or phrase so you can hear proper pronunciation. Then you get a turn to try it out. You can connect a microphone to the computer if you have one for pronunciation comparison, or you can just speak aloud to yourself.

The program uses a “slides” system, meaning it gives you the information in short bursts. You click through from one slide to another. Some of the slides, like the one above, are words or phrases that you’ve already learned. They give you a little clock, and your goal is to come up with the correct translation of something you’ve already learned. If you’re stuck, you can add more time while you think or you can just get the answer. If you don’t remember the phrase, be assured that it’ll come up in a future slide. They’re really good about repetition in Mango Homeschool Edition.

Other slides, like the one pictured below, are culture slides. They tell you things about the culture of the language you’re studying. Those are just as important as the language slides, in my opinion, because you want to know what you’re getting yourself into if you ever travel to a country in which you’ll use your learned language (and that is, after all, the ultimate goal when learning a foreign language).

Similar to the culture slides are grammar slides. It’s important to remember when learning a new language that even though they may use the same alphabet as English, they rarely follow the same grammatical rules. French, for instance, is a Romance language and uses masculine and feminine markers for nouns. We don’t do that in English, but it’s a vital part of their language, so it was one of the grammar slides.

What to Expect

Beyond the explanation I just gave with how the program works, you need to know that Mango Homeschool Edition is completely web based. You have to have a good internet connection and the current Flash player. It does not work on mobile devices.

Additionally, each member of you family will have his or her own account. If it’s just you learning, the price is $18/month or $125 a year. For each additional member who wants an account, it’s an extra $10 a month or $50 a year, up to 5 members. For 6 or more, there are special group rates, depending on the size of the group.

The program works in “Chapters,” each one based on a conversation. You hear the conversation in the first lesson of the chapter (if you’re completely new to your language, it sounds like gibberish!), and then throughout the next 4-6 lessons, you learn each piece of the conversation. By the end of the chapter, that conversation that sounded impossible to decipher is something you can actually understand!

How We Used Mango Languages

We don’t have a mic, so I sat with the kids during their lessons each day to help them with their pronunciation. It took a little more time than it would have if I’d been able to send them to do it themselves, but it was good for me, too. The kids did their lessons separately – otherwise they argued over whose turn it was to say the phrase first, and honestly, it was better for them to each have to come up with the correct answer on their own rather than repeating what their brother said.

My husband and I did lessons, too. One of our family goals is to spend some time living in France (not forever, but 6-12 months), so we’re all learning French. I took a placement test that was offered at the beginning of the course, and remembered enough from high school to be placed at lesson 17; everyone else in the family started at lesson 1. In addition to brushing up on my French, I also started started a Spanish-Latin America course. Our church is bilingual (English-Spanish), so I want to learn some Spanish to be more integrated there. (Most of the Hispanics speak English and Spanish, but not all of them.)

Pros and Cons

Mango Homeschool Edition is a really good program. It really took our foreign language lessons to the next level – something I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own. The system is attractive and easy to use. The only thing I was unsure about was the fact that it uses the translation method. In my mind, it seems like it would be harder to become fluent using the translation method because you’re always having to go back and forth between two languages in your head to say anything. On the other hand, the more you practice, the better you’ll get – regardless of method. So in the end, I think it’s a fine way of teaching languages.

In Conclusion

Mango Homeschool Edition was a great fit for our family. We still have a long way to go before we can move to France, but we’re way better off than we were two months ago in our pursuits of the French language and culture.

Do you struggle to teach your kids science? Looking for a great science system for early elementary kids? So was I, so when the opportunity for a Science4Us.com Online Subscription was offered to me in exchange for an honest review, I happily accepted.

What is Science4Us.com? I’m glad you asked. It’s a great program for early elementary kids, from Kindergarten through 2nd grade. It doesn’t cover experiments, but it gives kids a great foundation in a variety of subjects. Kids learn about the basics of science (starting with the tools that scientists use), and then move on to more “fun” stuff like animals and space. Each topic runs for 8 lessons, and each lesson takes roughly half an hour to teach. There are also fun activities that children can do on their own on the website. One of the cool things about Science4Us.com is that while it’s teaching science, it’s also reinforcing things kids this age learn in other subjects. One of Munchkin’s favorite activities was the “Silly Bulls” lesson, which is where key words from the teaching part of the lesson are broken into syllables, mixed up, and the child puts them back in the right order (get it? Syllables … Silly Bulls … ).

Science4Us.com has a login page for each student as well as one for the parent/teacher. You can sit right next to your kids while they do the activities, or you can set them free on the site to work through the modules and check their progress, including information/activities from their digital science notebook, in your teacher dashboard. The website allows you to assign modules to your students, and also for your students to select what they want to learn about each day, so there’s a bit of freedom in how you work the program.

While the website is geared primarily toward younger kids (Kindergarten through 2nd grade, like I mentioned above), it’s also a great place for upper elementary kids to get a refresher course in what they learned when they were younger. Even though Seahawk is in 4th grade, he’s been using Science4Us.com and loving it. Because it’s geared to the younger children, though, I’ve been focusing on having Munchkin use it and letting Seahawk on there when time permits.

Once they finished the science tools module, it was interesting to see what each kid chose to study. Munchkin was all over Life Science, which covers Living vs. Nonliving, Plants, and Animals. Seahawk wanted to study Space, which covers Exploring the Universe and Earth in Space. The Exploring the Universe module was really cool. My favorite part, and I think Seahawk’s too, was the exploration of our galaxy. It opened up a map of sorts of the Milky Way, and you could click on the different planets and it would zoom in and give you all sorts of facts about each one. You could also rotate and spin around the solar system. They provided a “ring” showing each planet’s course around the sun, which I think was helpful in keeping them straight while you clicked through them, making sure you chose the one you wanted to explore further.

This is the “main” view of the solar system page – what you see when you first open it.

And these two show you how you could flip all around to get different views.

And here’s Venus’ page. There was one of these for each of the planets, the sun, and Earth’s moon.

For a basic science curriculum for young kids, I think Science4Us.com is a great choice. There are so many choices in study topics that there’s something for everyone. With the “assign” feature, you don’t even have to strictly monitor your kids if you don’t want to. The website is ad-free, so you don’t have to worry about that while your kids are learning. As a subscription-based service, there’s a ton of flexibility, too. You can keep it during the school year and let it go during the summer, or you can keep it year-round if that’s your thing. They also provide printable pages for the kids if you’re a “worksheet” kind of teacher. You still need to have the online time, since the information is taught using online videos and interactive activities, but the worksheets are great for reinforcing what your kids have learned during their online sessions. And at $7.95 a month, it’s a really affordable option if you don’t know what to do for your young learner’s science needs.

To close, I just want to show you guys how big an impact this program had on Munchkin. We have a notebook that he and I write in, letters back and forth, and in one of his recent letters, he included this picture:

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Welcome to my final day of Homeschooling Essentials. Thank you so much for joining me this week as I’ve explored what I find necessary to teach my kiddos.

I forgot to mention it earlier in the week, but please note that there are almost 90 other mamas blogging on this topic this week, not just me and the other nine I’ve been listing at the ends of my posts. Click that banner up at the top for the full listing!

As I was trying to decide what the last item on my list should be, there were a plethora of options. Time, money, a good Bible, curriculum, a Kindle or other e-book reader… the list goes on and on. (And let me be clear: all of those, especially the Bible, are vital, I think. But I had to narrow it down to what I could fit into a week, so that’s what I’ve done.) I’ve found that with the other items I talked about this week (pencils, flexibility, and a plan), none of them would really matter without material to teach. And that’s where the library card comes in. If you have a good library system where you live, definitely invest the time to go get a card. Even if you have to pay an annual fee to access it (if you live outside of city limits and therefore your taxes don’t go to the library system, for example), it’s totally worth it. There’s no other place to get access to hundreds, thousands, millions of books for free.

I mentioned last summer when I was planning our homeschool year that I was going to use Ambleside Online for our core curriculum this year. We’ve stuck with that (for the most part), and the kids adore it. This is by far the best year of homeschooling we’ve ever done. But none of it would be possible without our library card. Almost all of the books prescribed in the Ambleside curriculum are available through our library system. And better yet, they’re not in high demand, so we’ve been able to get them pretty easily. If we’d had to buy all of those books (mostly through Amazon, as Ambleside utilizes primarily older books that a current bookstore isn’t likely to have), it would have cost us hundreds of dollars. But because of our library card, we’ve been able to spend roughly $20 on books is all. A good library system has been a real blessing to our family.

In addition to the schoolbooks, Munchkin participates in the monthly book club that the library offers. (They have one for Seahawk’s age, too, but he’s a much pickier reader and hasn’t been interested in the books they’ve been offering lately.) Without our frequent trips to the library, we wouldn’t know about the book club, and that would be a bummer.

So that’s it from me. Thanks again for joining me this week! Next week, I’ll be back to more of what I normally write about. I don’t what all I’ve got on the agenda, but there’ll be at least one recipe :). I’ll also try to have a Picture of the Week up later today or tomorrow as well.

Blessings,

Wendy

Don’t forget to click the banner up above for a HUGE list of Homeschooling Mamas talking about their essentials! And for just a taste of the topic, check out these lovely ladies:

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Welcome back to the Homeschooling Essentials series! I hope you’re enjoying reading about everyone’s Essentials and maybe even learning some tricks and tips for including some of them into your homeschool.

Today’s Essential from me is a plan. I have to know in advance what I’m going to be teaching or it doesn’t get done. It’s as simple as that. I’ve tried it both ways, with a plan and without one, and hands down, it’s better when I plan things out. I was blessed enough to win a copy of The Well Planned Day Homeschool Planner earlier this school year, and it’s made a huge difference in our school. Things are no longer crazy “what do we have to do today?” And the kids are more focused too ;).

You don’t need any specific planner, although I do highly recommend the Well Planned Day. Just find one that works for you and your specific needs. The things you’ll need to include are the different subjects you need/want to teach, and a space for the lesson required for each child. That’s it. You can even make your own. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to work.

Even though my kids are in different grades, we do pretty much everything except silent reading and math together, so my planner looks kind of blank, but it’s really not. I should be a veteran teacher by now, since this is our third year of homeschooling “seriously,” but most of the time I still feel like a rookie. Having a good planner and taking the time each week (or ideally, planning out more than one week in advance, although that rarely happens) to fill it in really helps me a lot.

In case you’re curious, here are the subjects we do regularly:

Bible (typically, I read 2-4 chapters aloud to the kids; last week, we read the Gospel of Mark, this week, we’re reading some of the epistles)

Math (currently the kiddos are learning their multiplication tables using flash cards; once they have those mastered, which I suspect will be soon, we’ll move on to age-specific stuff for them)

Reading (Munchkin participates in a book club at the public library so he reads that book; Seahawk decided he didn’t love book club, so he’s reading Johnny Tremain right now – he loves history, so historical fiction was the right choice for him)

French (we’ve been using the lessons from SchoolhouseTeacher.com, but I recently got a membership to Mango Languages – look for the review near the end of February!)

History (reading An Island Story: A History of England for Girls and Boys)

And that pretty much fills our day. I try to have us done with lessons by the time Small Fry goes down for nap (at 2:00) so that the kids can go play with their friends while the baby sleeps. There’s another homeschool family just around the corner from us, so our kids and their kids play together a lot. That’s been a real blessing. While the baby sleeps and the kids are out playing, that’s “my” time. I use those couple of hours to tidy the house, take care of the breakfast and lunch dishes in preparation for dinner, and then do any sewing or quiet reading of my own.

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Welcome to Day 2 of my Homeschooling Essentials! Today it’s all about flexibility.

You have to be flexible to be a homeschooling parent. Things don’t always go exactly the way you planned, and that has to be okay. There are unexpected sick days (for the kids and you), last minute errands (or days of errands…), and burnout days. You have to be flexible enough to let things go and say “There’s always tomorrow.”

Earlier this month, we had half a week of the need to be flexible. Right around New Year’s, Small Fry was sick. I think it was New Year’s Eve, actually. He was just feeling puny and was not himself, and finally, about an hour before bedtime, it became clear why when he threw up all over me (sorry if that’s TMI…). That was on a Wednesday. Thursday was normal, and on Friday, Munchkin was sick with the same thing. He spent the day in bed, but was fine the next morning. But that morning, Seahawk was under the weather and slept most of the day. Sunday of that week, the day before I’d planned to start school up again, was fine. We went for a family bike ride and all was well. During the night, though, I came down with the illness. Here’s where the need to be flexible really struck. Even though it was Monday, and the day we were “supposed” to get back to school, there was no school happening with Mom stuck in bed. Let me also say, I am incredibly blessed to have a husband who’s self-employed and works (mostly) from home. He was able to take that Monday (which happened to be our anniversary…) off to take care of the kids so I could sleep and recover. Enter Flexibility Day 2: Tuesday. We’d missed school on Monday, and because we’d also missed our anniversary, we took Tuesday off from school, too. The kids spent the morning with Grandma so hubby and I could have our anniversary date. (We went to see Saving Mr. Banks. Have you seen it? Very good. I don’t even care for Mary Poppins and I liked Mr. Banks. In fact, hubby’s been reading the book Mary Poppins aloud to the kids this weekend. Then we’re going to watch the movie, and on Tuesday, which is discount day at the cinema, we’re all going to see Saving Mr. Banks again.)Anyway. So we started school on Wednesday the 8th instead of Monday the 6th. And did anyone die? Nope. Because we understand the importance of being flexible.

Now, this is not to say that you can call yourself a homeschooler and just never “do” school with your kids. There has to be a balance, and I think it’s better to err on the side of more school days than less. The education has to happen, whether you’re at home or sending your kids to school. But you have to accept that things aren’t always perfect.

So that’s my thought for today.

Don’t forget to click through the links below and see what everyone else is writing about today!

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Hey guys! This is my first blog hop, and I’m really excited to spend the rest of the week talking about what I view as “Homeschooling Essentials.” When you’re done reading my post, make sure to head on over to the master list and read about everyone else’s Essentials too!

The essential I want to talk about today is very simple, and one we can’t do without in my homeschool: Pencils. Yep. Just the basic, yellow pencil. It might not be worth mentioning at all except when it’s time for school, the kiddos can never find one! No matter how many I buy, they’re always lost.

Have you ever seen how pencils are made? We watched a YouTube video with the kids once, a few months ago, and it was actually quite interesting. Here’s the short version. First, the wood, typically cedar because it’s soft enough to sharpen but hard enough to hold up under your grip, is cut into pieces and then a groove is added for laying the lead into. A layer of glue is added to each groove, and half of the wood sheets get lead in their grooves. Each sheet is enough to make 8 or 10 pencils. The other half of the sheets are then laid on top if the leaded sheets, where the “lead sandwiches” are pressed together with a vice for an hour while the glue dries. The pencils are then cut and painted. I found it interesting that it takes four coats of paint to fully conceal the wood grain. If you have five spare minutes sometime, I encourage you to watch one of the pencil videos (just search “how pencils are made” on YouTube; there are several to choose from). I think it’s good to know things like that, if for no other reason than to keep us from taking things for granted.

We couldn’t do school without pencils. I’m sure my kids wish we could, but I’m not one of those homeschool moms who goes the “unschooling” route; I need some sort of record of what the kids have done, and I need to push them to do things that they wouldn’t necessarily choose for themselves, which is the antithesis of unschooling. Don’t get me wrong – I totally want my kids to love learning, and I want them to develop ways of learning naturally. But I can’t leave their education up to them. Otherwise Seahawk wouldn’t be as strong a reader as he is, Munchkin wouldn’t know anything about history, and neither one would be proficient in their times tables. All of those things are important – as important as having fun learning. And without our trusty pencils, we wouldn’t have a record of what they’ve learned.

So that’s my first homeschool essential. Make sure to visit my fellow bloggers to read all about theirs, and come back tomorrow for another of mine!

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Welcome to my first official review for the Schoolhouse Review Crew! I was given a yearly membership option to SchoolhouseTeachers.com in order to write a review on the site. I can sum up my feelings about the site in one word: amazing. But that’s not a review, so let me go over some of the many wonderful things you’ll find there.

I’ve spent most of my time in the “Pre-K/Elementary” tab, simply because that’s how old my kids are. There’s so much information there that so far I’ve barely been able to scratch the surface. Take a look at all the topics:

We’ve already used the French lessons. I’ve really loved having a lesson plan. I know the basics of the language, but not necessarily how to teach it. The printouts (for teaching the lesson and worksheets for the kids) are wonderful. We’ve done the first two lessons so far: the French alphabet and accent marks. Some of the things in the later lessons (counting, primarily) are things I’ve already taught them, so we’ll breeze through those more quickly than we have thus far. I just love knowing that they’re getting the foundation they need for the language.

The Science tab is also pretty cool. There are YouTube videos from Jason Lindsey explaining some of the basics of why things are (or happen) the way they are (or do). There’s a new video up each week, and they’re designed to be hands-on experiments that you can do with your kids with things you have around the house. This week’s video answers “why do cranberries pop when you boil them?”

For the parent who wants to homeschool but is completely unsure where to begin, SchoolhouseTeachers.com has a “Dailies” tab that will give you a straight up, daily lesson in each subject. No (well, very little) planning needed. Just go to the site and print. Easy.

There are topics in the “dailies” category ranging from copywork (which Munchkin is working on right behind me as I type this post) and math to spelling, art, and even tests if you want to go that route with your kiddos.

I think my favorite thing (that I’ve found so far) on the site is the planners that are included absolutely free with your paid membership. There are 5 of them, and you can download, modify, and print them to fit your teaching style/homeschool situation. There’s the basic planner for moms; a planner for parents of special needs kids; and student planners for elementary, middle, and high school kids. All I’ve had time to look at thus far is the elementary student planner, but it’s absolutely wonderful. It includes not only the planner pages (calendars), but also articles specifically geared toward the kids and pages of “important lists” – things like the planets in order and a times table.

You can start your very own membership at SchoolhouseTeachers.com for only $3. That’s right – $3 buys you your first month of full access to the site. If you like it, you can continue your membership for the low monthly price of $12.95. Based on the amount of content on the site, and the fact that not only is updated regularly but the back lessons are archived for access later, $12.95 a month is a real bargain. But it gets better. Buy a full year all at once and you’ll save 10%, bringing the price to $139. And during the month of December, if you sign up for the annual price, you’re locked in at that rate, and you get an additional membership to gift to a friend. Believe me, any mom with school-age kids would be super blessed by this gift! Oh, and one more thing: the price, whether monthly or yearly, covers the whole family. There’s no hidden “additional kid” fee.

Keep in mind, too, that just because my review focused primarily on the elementary part of the site, that’s not all there is. There’s something there for every age range from toddlers through teens. Perfect for any family!

I’m not the only one reviewing this site this week. Head on over to the Schoolhouse Review Crew to find even more opinions on the site before you buy in. It’s always best not to rely on just one person’s opinion, after all.